Some Constructive Critizism
First the praise:
As far as overall interface V4 is definitely ahead of V3 IMHO. It is clean and simple and things are easy to understand. The right click menu is excellent - much more understandable than V3. I find the interlinear visually appealing and easy to use.
The exegetical guide and passage guide are also excellent - easy to use and understand.
However as soon as you start using other tools things get very overwhelming.
To me V4 is like a water fountain - its function is very strait forward, and how to use it is almost self explanatory. The problem is with this water "fountain" when you press the well located and well defined push button to access the water, suddenly you are hit with fire hose force water and you are so shocked by the amount of water that you pull away before you get a drink!
For example:
Cited By
I love the concept of this tool - but as soon as you use it - it is a mental overload. You don't know where to look, there are words everywhere - and the most useful information (name of the book) is grayed out telling your brain it is superfluous info.
If you compare V3's "search for references to John 1:1" to "cited by john 1:1" The results are quite in contrast. In V3 things are very manageable - one line for each book (in alphabetical order) with a + sign if you want to expand that book to show all the references. - In V4's cited by tool you get what appears to be random words from random books. If you look really close and read things carefully you can kind of sort through things but it is occward to say the least. Again like a "fire hose" hit you full blast
Basic Search
Similar things can be said for the "basic search" for john 1:1. There is way to much information. Visually what jumps out as the attention getter is the pictures of the books. This looks really cool but it tells me nothing. There are over 800 books in my library, I can't remember all the icons, so my eyes are drown to it but it tells me nothing. Next my eyes are drawn to the blue text which are the names of the articles - but I still don't know the name of the book. One of the last places my eyes want to go is to the black text which is the name of the book.
Also because all of the articles are written out on the screen - it is overwhelming. Notice the following screen shots:
compared to V4's search result
In V3 I get the results of 19 books on one screen and it is very clear. In V4 I don't even get the results of one book and it is confusing and intimidating.
The cited by is even worse:
There is also the issue with information tool where you only get a piece of the article (lexicon for example). often times you never get to the English part in the space allotted - so you may as will not have it listed in the information window at all.
Enough of the criticisms - here is a possible solution:
Follow the pattern already set in the passage and exegetical guides and make use of the little arrows that expand and contract sections.
Using these menus would greatly simplify things:
In the information tool you would have a blue highlighted area with the heading lexicon and number of results. clicking the little arrow would expand to reveal the complete article(s).
In the cited by and the basic search results again you would have the heading (name of book) in the blue highlight with the number of hits in that book shown. Click the arrow and you have the articles from that book.
I searched my library repeatedly in V3 - in V4 I avoid it. This should not be the case for a library system that was built to be searched. My bigger concern is how this will impact other users when this goes public, especially seeing they will not have the same motivation to stay with V4 as we Beta testers.
Comments
-
Greg,
I agree with your reactions to some of the tools. I've questioned the 'Cited By" tool a few times and we have seen some improvements over the course of Beta testing: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/1183/9495.aspx. I'm hopeful that in a post 4.0 release that some of the major shortcomings will be addressed.
The tool should present the results by "By Book" and not "Ranked". The way in which the "Ranked" results produces results does not seem best for the Cited By tool. The tool should begin with the name of the Resource, as is implicit in a tool named "Cited By". The results should be collapsible.
"By Book" search results need also to be collapsible.
The information tool needs to present the whole article for Greek Words.
I am confident that each of these will be addressed after the release of 4.0.
0 -
Greg,
I like a lot of your ideas, and we're already looking at how to incorporate some of them in a future release.
0
